KILLING BROTHER
SENTENCED TO DEATH
KILLING BROTHER. 'a working-title/novel.
***by continuing on, the following are all alleged accounts and are in fact notes for a novel.
A novel, based on true events to be an example of injustice with the hope of saving those most at risk.
It begs the question...
'What would you do, if your life was stolen from you as a result of your efforts to #STOPGunSchoolViolence.'
As far as innocents goes, I'm the one slaughtered, and the prosecution is the gunman who destroys all in its wake.
If was guilty of harassment, I would have killed myself in jail with a razor... but, I believed in myself, and held on knowing full well I would be redeemed. To be locked up in the world famous Ryker's, one would assume it would wreak utter havoc on one's self. Johnny was not guilty, so he had nothing to feel bad about. Johnny did however grow empathetic to the 'system.' We laugh at the thought of Ryker's closing and can only comment that although it's closing is a great PR campaign, and it is true that Ryker's is corrupt, so is our entire judicial system..
Let's first deal with al the police and prosecutorial misconduct.
While Mayor DiBlasio is proud of Ryker's closing, he should be tackling the real problems- a corrupt judicial system where those who cannot afford high-priced council are not properly defended, thus creating essential civil rights violations. Everyone is afforded a fair trial- I laugh...
One can only believe in one's self only for so long- it then begs the question, when is enough enough. Like I said, if I was actually guilty of such a heinous act, I would have taken my life because it would mean that I had violated what I've spent my entire life to fight against, and I wouldn't live as a fraud...
All the inhumanities of the world are not the result of all the violence, but it is based on how barbaric we treat one another.
(I need to also address an area in which I have a great deal of embarrassment with. I am a survivor of abuse, and have survived several other traumas- each one comes with a certain degree of PTSD. In addition to being diagnosed with PTSD, I'm also clinically disabled by a brain injury sustained when I was struck by a drunk-driver as a 19 years old. So, if my writing reads a little off- do not laugh and do not think me illiterate... All I ask is that you allow me to proof read it again, and again, and yet again... It's all connected... but not in my conviction. Brooke Shields and Co. state as a matters of fact many- if not all... that they do not know me, and what they do recall is made up to fit a narrative- 'the' narrative demanded for a conviction. )
With our current president in office and the world seemingly not having an issue of his misogyny and the The O'Reilly effect now synonymous with sexual misconduct, AND seeing my prosecution is based on my desire to #STOPGunSchoolViolence, and not anything 'predatory' I hold my head high....
We cannot control what is said about us. But, we can however choose in the matter in which we respond/live. Taking one's own life is a serious issue, and the people who take on the issue of suicide must be applauded. Like all things of concern, the more people talk about an issue, the better we will all be as a result. And isn't this true with all things- the more one knows, the better one will do? So, if my holding my ground gets me convicted, so be it. I am not a predator and all who know me know this for a fact. I stood up to the system and now have created a dialogue felt throughout the world.
So, in the case of John Rinaldi, I took on a societal issue and presented an idea to bring the 'vital' attention needed to #STOPGunSchoolViolence. I didn't know 'how' to do it, I just knew- felt even that it needed to be done. Falsely accused, I've used my wrongful prosecution to fight an issue that I believes needs to be fought. In doing so, I've gone from connecting a mere 100,000+ people's support to now currently have over 17,000,000+. People-wise we were a success- personally we've fallen. And the one's who lose are you- the American people affected by terrorists and who's sense of security had been shaken.
This is our/my story..... The Sandy Hook CenTer is me, but I speak in the plural 'we' because of the sensitivity surrounding the issue. In my humility, I am a mere notch in the scheme of things, and to suggest I alone can create change or suggest that I am responsible for something we as an entire nation should already be doing doesn't seem right. Ethics aside, I felt a deep desire to do something, and unlike all those who other-wise would bitch, I chose action.
Up until Newtown's tragedy, I was fully comfortable about supporting like minded organizations. Unfortunately, no one was building a CenTer in Newtown to honor the 26 lives stolen on 12 December, 2012, so I had to step up and work it out as I went. And we were doing well.... until, we were misunderstood and criminalized in the process. We been labeled conspiracists by many over my contempt for our judicial system. We claim that we were not only wrongfully convicted, but have evidentiary proof.
tbc.
ME.
On 8 June, 2009 my sister Kelly gave birth to a beautiful baby boy named Anthony Daniel Rinaldi- I call him Anthony John Daniel Rinaldi for obvious reasons. To say I was excited would be na understatement. I have barrier issues- you'll laugh at the later, by-the-way... You see, Kelly is mine- well she was mine. I was the big brother, I was the dad, I was the best-friend, and then I became the co-parent. On Anthony's second day home from the hospital, both he and my sister had been abandoned by the biological father. We would come to find out that he was on his third- 3rd family, and my sister wanted nothing to do with it. In many senses of the word, she was not only mis-led, but lied to. He wasn't the business owner he claimed to be, nor was he able to hold down a job. Long story short, Kelly couldn't marry him even if she had wanted to for fear of all his back parental support. We can address that all later- if at all because it has no relevance- he HAS NO relevance...
Anthony was born 2months premature or you could bet I'd have been there for his delivery. The one thing I can say is that I was always there for Kelly. Or at least I had hoped she thought I was. Kelly and I have an inseparable bond and she would forever remain my person, and I hers. Meaning that it was understood that no matter whether she or I were in a relationship, no one would come between us, and they didn't. Anthony was born, as I said premature. He weighed in at 2lbs 1oz, and I'm proud to say that not only has he more than caught up to the other children his age, he excels at everything. Anthony's arm can throw a baseball like you've never seen, and at just 7 he hold a blue belt in Tae Kwan Do. My boy on all accounts is a stud, and he's kind- that of whichI'm most proud.
After Anthony continued to grow to a healthy and safer rate, he was released from the St. Petersburg NicU unit, but was attached to a sensor system that monitored his heart to ensure its beating properly. On his second day home from the hospital, the biological father abandoned Kelly and Anthony and I was called in as a 'pinch-hitter.' 'had I never left......
In 2011, I returned home believing I
Anthony was born 2months premature or you could bet I'd have been there for his delivery. The one thing I can say is that I was always there for Kelly. Or at least I had hoped she thought I was. Kelly and I have an inseparable bond and she would forever remain my person, and I hers. Meaning that it was understood that no matter whether she or I were in a relationship, no one would come between us, and they didn't. Anthony was born, as I said premature. He weighed in at 2lbs 1oz, and I'm proud to say that not only has he more than caught up to the other children his age, he excels at everything. Anthony's arm can throw a baseball like you've never seen, and at just 7 he hold a blue belt in Tae Kwan Do. My boy on all accounts is a stud, and he's kind- that of whichI'm most proud.
After Anthony continued to grow to a healthy and safer rate, he was released from the St. Petersburg NicU unit, but was attached to a sensor system that monitored his heart to ensure its beating properly. On his second day home from the hospital, the biological father abandoned Kelly and Anthony and I was called in as a 'pinch-hitter.' 'had I never left......
In 2011, I returned home believing I
1978
I was born in 1966, but my life truly began in 1978. In 1978, we brought home a little baby girl, named Kelly. It was like Christmas and a birthday all rolled into one.. I might even add
THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
Michael Levine was a horrible, horrible man who out of spite wrote a rather disturbing sequence of falsified reports on an extortion site- aka 'consumer' site called RipOff Report. It was meant to wreak havoc and havoc it wreaked in my personal and business life.
Suffice to say, Michael succeeded.
These 'so-called' reports were for all the world to see and depicted me as the worst possible monster there ever was. In my attempt to 'control' the damage, I contacted the NYPD Cyber-Crimes Unit- Detective Paul Arroyo, and Detective Thomas of the NYPD Police Commissioner's office for support. It was there that we were then able to control the extortion site's narrative. We had gotten Michael to recant his reports, and gained his admittance of such heinous acts.
Or so we thought.. the reports remained on-line and people foolishly believed them- where there is smoke there must be fire. And in Brooke's case, since there was only smoke she created the fire.
Michael Levine of Morristown / Livingston, NJ passed away February 7, 2017 after suffering a long illness.
Karma is a bitch.
Suffice to say, Michael succeeded.
These 'so-called' reports were for all the world to see and depicted me as the worst possible monster there ever was. In my attempt to 'control' the damage, I contacted the NYPD Cyber-Crimes Unit- Detective Paul Arroyo, and Detective Thomas of the NYPD Police Commissioner's office for support. It was there that we were then able to control the extortion site's narrative. We had gotten Michael to recant his reports, and gained his admittance of such heinous acts.
Or so we thought.. the reports remained on-line and people foolishly believed them- where there is smoke there must be fire. And in Brooke's case, since there was only smoke she created the fire.
Michael Levine of Morristown / Livingston, NJ passed away February 7, 2017 after suffering a long illness.
Karma is a bitch.
Ripoff Report is exactly like creating your own web site and it allows anyone to post anything without holding anyone accountable. The site is registered and protected under Texas legislation and anyone who opposes must appeal to the state of Texas.
OR
For a fee, as this site then solicits, you can pay them to 'restore your on-line' reputation for a nominal fee. Detective Thomas of the NYPD Police Commissioner's office investigated this fact and was given a 'fee-estimate' of anywhere from $5,000. to $100,000.
Suffice to say, although consumer sites may in theory may have some good attributes, RipOff Report has none. However, when there is no truth RipOff Report is simply nothing more than an extortion site.
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Sergeant Kevin Blake formerly of the NYPD 6th Precinct testified in court June 15, 2016 (from the picture seen here), that he witnessed John Rinaldi walking down 10th St that earned him a stalking charge.
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After being called out for perjury on social media, Kevin Blake then stalked John Rinaldi on January 12, 2016 from 6pm to 11:13 pm in an unmarked Chevy Tahoe black on black truck. At exactly 11:13 pm, Sergeant Kevin Blake is seen on private video footage and also on surrounding surveillance camera assaulting me. He's seen punching in my car window, punching in a rear quarter panel, booting my car and then smashing the windshield.
Sergeant Kevin Blake doesn't like being called out for being a liar. He's now Lieutenant Kevin Blake.
Video and physical evidence is available.
*** fabricate a case. ensure you close by any means = PROMOTION.
Besides this ridiculous 'testimony,' and according to fact when one report is written and is then re-written to read entirely different, the rule is that it be excluded given the fact of contradiction. It wasn't. Furthermore, in court it was left unchallenged despite my stating clearly its opposition.
Police police, for the most part, in the matter of public safety. Unfortunately, it acts first then asks questions later. Given the seriousness of the 'would-be' crime, a person's safety should always be at the forefront of any investigation. If you add children to the mix, then by all means, use any force necessary... 'especially given the violence in today's world.
However, in my case I have always been transparent on-line. That said, this should never have gotten so far out of hand. Had it not been for celebrity privilege and the abuses of power things never would have escalated to the parameters as it has.
For a year and a half I was offered a disorderly conduct. Had there been any merit of wrong doing.. i.e. any truth of harassment or stalking, to then demote a serious crime into something equivalent as say swearing loudly in public would be irresponsible. But, there was no crime committed and what would proceed would equate to a criminal cover-up. When I wouldn't be bullied into a plea they then committed the crimes of perjury and the subornation of perjury.
Ms. Gregory left the Manhattan DA's office after she was heard saying that she 'was tired of putting innocent people in jail.'
Being one of those innocent people, I then have to ask.. 'if you don't want to wrongfully convict, then don't suborn perjury 2 win.'
Subornation of PerjuryThe criminal offense of procuring another to commit perjury, which is the crime of lying, in a material matter, while under oath.
It is a criminal offense to induce someone to commit perjury. In a majority of states, the offense is defined by statute.
Under federal Criminal Law (18 U.S.C.A. § 1622), five elements must be proved to convict a person of subornation of perjury. It first must be shown that the defendant made an agreement with a person to testify falsely. There must be proof that perjury has in fact been committed and that the statements of the perjurer were material. The prosecutor must also provide evidence that the perjurer made such statements willfully with knowledge of their falsity. Finally, there must be proof that the procurer had knowledge that the perjurer's statements were false.
Anjelica is now a litigation associate in the New York office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP. Prior to joining Kirkland, Anjelica spent three years prosecuting misdemeanors and felonies at the New York County District Attorney’s Office. (2013–2016).
Currently, Ms. Angelica Gregory has several complaints against her that have been filed with the NY Grand Jury, the DA's Office, and the NY Attorney General.
The AG has later gone on to tell me that this type of 'abuse of power happens all too often.' And we wonder why Rykers is now used as a campaign talking point.
Being one of those innocent people, I then have to ask.. 'if you don't want to wrongfully convict, then don't suborn perjury 2 win.'
Subornation of PerjuryThe criminal offense of procuring another to commit perjury, which is the crime of lying, in a material matter, while under oath.
It is a criminal offense to induce someone to commit perjury. In a majority of states, the offense is defined by statute.
Under federal Criminal Law (18 U.S.C.A. § 1622), five elements must be proved to convict a person of subornation of perjury. It first must be shown that the defendant made an agreement with a person to testify falsely. There must be proof that perjury has in fact been committed and that the statements of the perjurer were material. The prosecutor must also provide evidence that the perjurer made such statements willfully with knowledge of their falsity. Finally, there must be proof that the procurer had knowledge that the perjurer's statements were false.
Anjelica is now a litigation associate in the New York office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP. Prior to joining Kirkland, Anjelica spent three years prosecuting misdemeanors and felonies at the New York County District Attorney’s Office. (2013–2016).
Currently, Ms. Angelica Gregory has several complaints against her that have been filed with the NY Grand Jury, the DA's Office, and the NY Attorney General.
The AG has later gone on to tell me that this type of 'abuse of power happens all too often.' And we wonder why Rykers is now used as a campaign talking point.
Kelly is my baby sister, the love of my life and everything I hold most dear in the world. The last time we would ever speak we laughed and carried on as we usually did. I said my good-byes and laughed myself to sleep... that was 271 days ago.
Kelly and I spoke every day... sometimes we'd speak several times throughout the day. If she was upset or whatever, I felt it. It didn't matter if she was in the room next door or a 1000 miles away. If she was ok, I was ok..
I woke the morning of the 22nd with an indescribable angst. I knew something was wrong- I could just feel it and I of course went directly to the phone and called, and called, and called. After a few hours of hearing that inner-voice, I panicked! Something was wrong...
Kelly was dead- I just knew it. And she was.
Kelly and I spoke every day... sometimes we'd speak several times throughout the day. If she was upset or whatever, I felt it. It didn't matter if she was in the room next door or a 1000 miles away. If she was ok, I was ok..
I woke the morning of the 22nd with an indescribable angst. I knew something was wrong- I could just feel it and I of course went directly to the phone and called, and called, and called. After a few hours of hearing that inner-voice, I panicked! Something was wrong...
Kelly was dead- I just knew it. And she was.
For the third year in a row the number of exonerations in the United States has hit a record high. A total of 166 wrongly convicted people whose convictions date as far back as 1964 were declared innocent in 2016, according to a report from the National Registry of Exonerations released Tuesday. On average, there are now over three exonerations per week—more than double the rate in 2011.
The number of exonerations has generally increased since 1989, the first year in the National Registry’s database. There are 2,000 individual exonerations listed in the registry as of March 6.
Experts say the increase in rate of exonerations can be explained, in part, by a growing trend of accountability in prosecutorial offices around the country. Twenty-nine counties, including Chicago’s Cook County, Dallas County and Brooklyn’s Kings County have adopted second-look procedures and special review units that are tasked with looking into questionable convictions.
Historically, the convictions with the best chances of being overturned were those that got repeatedly reviewed on appeal or those chosen by legal institutions such as the Innocence Project and the Center on Wrongful Convictions. These cases tended to be high profile cases with defendants who received severe sentences.
The recently established conviction review units, on the other hand, designate resources to both violent and nonviolent crimes like drug offenses. These offices have been involved in 225 exonerations, 70 of which were last year. Thanks largely to these cases, nonviolent crimes accounted for more exonerations (44%) than murder and manslaughter exonerations (33%) in 2016.
The review units “reflect a growing recognition of the importance of the problem,” says Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan who is co-founder and senior editor of the National Registry. “Many prosecutors, police officers and judges have learned that sending innocent people to prison is a constant risk—not a once-in-a-lifetime novelty.”
Many point to changes in places like Harris County, Texas, home to the city of Houston, where the county’s conviction review unit has totaled 128 exonerations, or 15% of all exonerations in the U.S., since 2010, the first full year it was in operation. Harris County identified a problem that is likely systemic across the U.S. and has actively spent the last two years trying to right its wrongs.
It started in 2014, when a reporter from the Austin American-Statesman reached out to the district attorney’s office to ask about something he had noticed: a steady stream of years-old drug convictions were being overturned. In many of these cases, the so-called drugs were actually legal substances like over the counter medications that had been initially misidentified by faulty field test kits.
The field tests, which have been around since the 1970s and cost $2, are simple chemical cocktails that change color when illegal drugs like cocaine are added. But the color also changes when exposed to dozens of other compounds, yielding a false positive.
The district attorney’s office ascertained that there was a backlog of these drug cases in which the defendant had pleaded guilty. As ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine reported in great detail last year, the county worked to streamline the process of reexamining these cases, kicking off a mass reversal of convictions over the next two years. In addition, Harris County now no longer accepts guilty pleas in drug cases until the substance has been tested in a lab.
What’s remarkable about Harris County is that the crime labs there have tested suspected drugs even after a guilty plea. According to Gross, this is not done in many other major counties. And in many jurisdictions, evidence is destroyed once a defendant pleads guilty.
“If other labs did what they do in Houston, we’d see thousands of similar cases across the country,” he says.
Kim Ogg, who was sworn in as Harris County’s District Attorney in January, says that she plans to keep the conviction review unit open in order to make the judicial system more trustworthy. In total, she says, the office has alerted 317 individuals in drug cases where no controlled substance was found and 148 cases are still pending.
“We take every case of wrongful conviction seriously,” Ogg says. “It’s a threat to the public trust.”
Now other counties are reacting. Las Vegas’s Clark County, for instance, established a conviction review unit in October, the same month that ProPublica and the Las Vegas Review-Journal exposed that, like Harris County, the Clark County district attorney’s office convicted defendants on the basis of field test evidence in recent years despite knowing that the tests have a high error rate.
Data from the National Registry shows that more than half of exonerations involve perjury or false accusations. This problem is particularly prevalent in homicide cases and child sex abuse cases. Mistaken witness identification is often an issue in sexual assault cases.
DNA has played a role in roughly a quarter of exonerations since 1989, the year it was first used to clear David Vasquez, who was falsely convicted of murder in Arlington County, Va. In the last decade the number of DNA exonerations has held steady at about 20 cases per year. (Biological evidence is typically tested before trial so the majority of DNA-related exonerations these days are for convictions that happened decades ago.)
But these reasons don’t fully explain why so many false convictions are happening in the first place. There are underlying issues in the law enforcement and criminal justice system that run far deeper, says Gross.
“If you fix problems like the drug tests, that’s a good thing,” says Gross. “But then the question is why were you stopped in the first place? Why were you asked to step out of the car? And why were you searched? That’s the real question.”
A second report released Tuesday authored by Gross points to the apparent racial disparity in wrongful convictions. Gross’s analysis found that almost half of the exonerations in the national database are black defendants, compared with 39% who are white.
Racial bias is particularly stark in cases where numerous defendants were exonerated together. Separate from the individual exonerations listed in the National Registry, an additional 1,840 defendants have been cleared in 15 “group” exonerations across the country since 1989. The great majority of these groups were framed for drug cases that never happened and, likewise, a great majority of these groups were predominantly black.
Other racial biases are evident in Gross’s analysis. For instance, sexual assaults by black men on white women are a small minority of all sexual assaults in the U.S., but they make up half of sexual assaults with eyewitness misidentification.
Other disturbing trends reinforce the widely-documented racial bias that blacks face at every step of the system. They are more likely to be targets of police misconduct. They receive harsher sentences than whites for the same crimes. And, for violent crimes like murder and sexual assault, they spend several years longer in prison before exoneration.
Other studies from academic institutions and the federal government have also highlighted racial disparities in law enforcement and sentencing. The Justice Department, for example, released a study in 2015 that found black men received roughly 5% to 10% longer prison sentences than white men for similar crimes.
Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch elevated issues of race during her tenure under President Obama and last year implemented a bias recognition training program for all federal law enforcement divisions as well as the 94 U.S. Attorney’s Offices in the country.
“You have situations where you can see people are treated differently,” Lynch said last year when speaking at Harvard Law School on the subject of racial bias in law enforcement.
Lynch’s predecessor, Eric Holder, similarly acknowledged racial disparities. In a 2014 video message he said, “This overrepresentation of young men of color in our criminal justice system is a problem we must confront—not only as an issue of individual responsibility but also as one of fundamental fairness, and as an issue of effective law enforcement.”
Black, white or any other race, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how many convicted defendants may actually be innocent. In attempt to answer this question, Gross published a paper in 2014 that estimated 4.1% of people on death-row are innocent while only 1.8% of them have been exonerated.
These estimates are based on a mathematical model that takes into account the number of death-row inmates who would have been exonerated had they not been executed, died in prison or had their sentences reduced. (Life-sentence cases receive far less scrutiny and are therefore less likely to be overturned than death-row cases.) Gross stands by those figures today.
For the broader population of convicts who are not on death row, Gross can only say that the 2,000 vindicated people in the National Registry represent a small fraction of those who are actually innocent.
That means many thousands of people could have served time or are in prison today for crimes they did not commit while the real criminals remain free. And for the few who do get exonerated, it’s unlikely that their lives just go back to normal.
“Even those who are eventually freed have lost large parts of their lives—their youth, the childhood of their children, the last years of their parents’ lives, their careers, their marriages,” Gross says. “False convictions wreak havoc in every direction.”
GRAPHICS SOURCES: National Registry of Exonerations as of March 6, 2017; “Rate of False Conviction of Criminal Defendants who are Sentenced to Death,” PNAS, 2014; Census; Bureau of Prisons
NOTES: Map figures exclude federal prosecutions, Puerto Rico and Guam. Exonerations by race do not include individuals who identify as Hispanic or Latino. Death-row innocence estimates calculated from all death-sentence defendants from 1973 to 2004.
The number of exonerations has generally increased since 1989, the first year in the National Registry’s database. There are 2,000 individual exonerations listed in the registry as of March 6.
Experts say the increase in rate of exonerations can be explained, in part, by a growing trend of accountability in prosecutorial offices around the country. Twenty-nine counties, including Chicago’s Cook County, Dallas County and Brooklyn’s Kings County have adopted second-look procedures and special review units that are tasked with looking into questionable convictions.
Historically, the convictions with the best chances of being overturned were those that got repeatedly reviewed on appeal or those chosen by legal institutions such as the Innocence Project and the Center on Wrongful Convictions. These cases tended to be high profile cases with defendants who received severe sentences.
The recently established conviction review units, on the other hand, designate resources to both violent and nonviolent crimes like drug offenses. These offices have been involved in 225 exonerations, 70 of which were last year. Thanks largely to these cases, nonviolent crimes accounted for more exonerations (44%) than murder and manslaughter exonerations (33%) in 2016.
The review units “reflect a growing recognition of the importance of the problem,” says Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan who is co-founder and senior editor of the National Registry. “Many prosecutors, police officers and judges have learned that sending innocent people to prison is a constant risk—not a once-in-a-lifetime novelty.”
Many point to changes in places like Harris County, Texas, home to the city of Houston, where the county’s conviction review unit has totaled 128 exonerations, or 15% of all exonerations in the U.S., since 2010, the first full year it was in operation. Harris County identified a problem that is likely systemic across the U.S. and has actively spent the last two years trying to right its wrongs.
It started in 2014, when a reporter from the Austin American-Statesman reached out to the district attorney’s office to ask about something he had noticed: a steady stream of years-old drug convictions were being overturned. In many of these cases, the so-called drugs were actually legal substances like over the counter medications that had been initially misidentified by faulty field test kits.
The field tests, which have been around since the 1970s and cost $2, are simple chemical cocktails that change color when illegal drugs like cocaine are added. But the color also changes when exposed to dozens of other compounds, yielding a false positive.
The district attorney’s office ascertained that there was a backlog of these drug cases in which the defendant had pleaded guilty. As ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine reported in great detail last year, the county worked to streamline the process of reexamining these cases, kicking off a mass reversal of convictions over the next two years. In addition, Harris County now no longer accepts guilty pleas in drug cases until the substance has been tested in a lab.
What’s remarkable about Harris County is that the crime labs there have tested suspected drugs even after a guilty plea. According to Gross, this is not done in many other major counties. And in many jurisdictions, evidence is destroyed once a defendant pleads guilty.
“If other labs did what they do in Houston, we’d see thousands of similar cases across the country,” he says.
Kim Ogg, who was sworn in as Harris County’s District Attorney in January, says that she plans to keep the conviction review unit open in order to make the judicial system more trustworthy. In total, she says, the office has alerted 317 individuals in drug cases where no controlled substance was found and 148 cases are still pending.
“We take every case of wrongful conviction seriously,” Ogg says. “It’s a threat to the public trust.”
Now other counties are reacting. Las Vegas’s Clark County, for instance, established a conviction review unit in October, the same month that ProPublica and the Las Vegas Review-Journal exposed that, like Harris County, the Clark County district attorney’s office convicted defendants on the basis of field test evidence in recent years despite knowing that the tests have a high error rate.
Data from the National Registry shows that more than half of exonerations involve perjury or false accusations. This problem is particularly prevalent in homicide cases and child sex abuse cases. Mistaken witness identification is often an issue in sexual assault cases.
DNA has played a role in roughly a quarter of exonerations since 1989, the year it was first used to clear David Vasquez, who was falsely convicted of murder in Arlington County, Va. In the last decade the number of DNA exonerations has held steady at about 20 cases per year. (Biological evidence is typically tested before trial so the majority of DNA-related exonerations these days are for convictions that happened decades ago.)
But these reasons don’t fully explain why so many false convictions are happening in the first place. There are underlying issues in the law enforcement and criminal justice system that run far deeper, says Gross.
“If you fix problems like the drug tests, that’s a good thing,” says Gross. “But then the question is why were you stopped in the first place? Why were you asked to step out of the car? And why were you searched? That’s the real question.”
A second report released Tuesday authored by Gross points to the apparent racial disparity in wrongful convictions. Gross’s analysis found that almost half of the exonerations in the national database are black defendants, compared with 39% who are white.
Racial bias is particularly stark in cases where numerous defendants were exonerated together. Separate from the individual exonerations listed in the National Registry, an additional 1,840 defendants have been cleared in 15 “group” exonerations across the country since 1989. The great majority of these groups were framed for drug cases that never happened and, likewise, a great majority of these groups were predominantly black.
Other racial biases are evident in Gross’s analysis. For instance, sexual assaults by black men on white women are a small minority of all sexual assaults in the U.S., but they make up half of sexual assaults with eyewitness misidentification.
Other disturbing trends reinforce the widely-documented racial bias that blacks face at every step of the system. They are more likely to be targets of police misconduct. They receive harsher sentences than whites for the same crimes. And, for violent crimes like murder and sexual assault, they spend several years longer in prison before exoneration.
Other studies from academic institutions and the federal government have also highlighted racial disparities in law enforcement and sentencing. The Justice Department, for example, released a study in 2015 that found black men received roughly 5% to 10% longer prison sentences than white men for similar crimes.
Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch elevated issues of race during her tenure under President Obama and last year implemented a bias recognition training program for all federal law enforcement divisions as well as the 94 U.S. Attorney’s Offices in the country.
“You have situations where you can see people are treated differently,” Lynch said last year when speaking at Harvard Law School on the subject of racial bias in law enforcement.
Lynch’s predecessor, Eric Holder, similarly acknowledged racial disparities. In a 2014 video message he said, “This overrepresentation of young men of color in our criminal justice system is a problem we must confront—not only as an issue of individual responsibility but also as one of fundamental fairness, and as an issue of effective law enforcement.”
Black, white or any other race, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how many convicted defendants may actually be innocent. In attempt to answer this question, Gross published a paper in 2014 that estimated 4.1% of people on death-row are innocent while only 1.8% of them have been exonerated.
These estimates are based on a mathematical model that takes into account the number of death-row inmates who would have been exonerated had they not been executed, died in prison or had their sentences reduced. (Life-sentence cases receive far less scrutiny and are therefore less likely to be overturned than death-row cases.) Gross stands by those figures today.
For the broader population of convicts who are not on death row, Gross can only say that the 2,000 vindicated people in the National Registry represent a small fraction of those who are actually innocent.
That means many thousands of people could have served time or are in prison today for crimes they did not commit while the real criminals remain free. And for the few who do get exonerated, it’s unlikely that their lives just go back to normal.
“Even those who are eventually freed have lost large parts of their lives—their youth, the childhood of their children, the last years of their parents’ lives, their careers, their marriages,” Gross says. “False convictions wreak havoc in every direction.”
GRAPHICS SOURCES: National Registry of Exonerations as of March 6, 2017; “Rate of False Conviction of Criminal Defendants who are Sentenced to Death,” PNAS, 2014; Census; Bureau of Prisons
NOTES: Map figures exclude federal prosecutions, Puerto Rico and Guam. Exonerations by race do not include individuals who identify as Hispanic or Latino. Death-row innocence estimates calculated from all death-sentence defendants from 1973 to 2004.
Wrongfully Convicted Cases, Statistics and Criminal Defense Lawyer ExperienceBy Andrew Stine | Published June-11-2014
Wrongful Conviction.
A miscarriage of justice primarily is the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. The term can also apply to errors in the other direction—”errors of impunity” and to civil cases. Most criminal justice systems have some means to overturn, or “quash”, a wrongful conviction, but this is often difficult to achieve. The most serious instances occur when a wrongful conviction is not overturned for several years, or until after the innocent person has been executed or died in jail.
“Miscarriage of justice” is sometimes synonymous with wrongful conviction, referring to a conviction reached in an unfair or disputed trial. Wrongful convictions are frequently cited by death penalty opponents as cause to eliminate death penalties to avoid executing innocent persons. In recent years, DNA evidence has been used to clear many people falsely convicted.
More than 2,000 people have been exonerated of serious crimes since 1989 in the United States, according to a report by college researchers who have established the first national registry of exonerations.
Researchers say their registry is the largest database of these types of cases and showcases some of the major issues with the criminal justice system, including that the leading causes of wrongful convictions are perjury, faulty witness identification and misconduct by prosecutors.
“No matter how tragic they are, even 2,000 exonerations over 23 years is a tiny number in a country with 2.3 million people in prisons and jails,” says a report released by the authors. “If that were the extent of the problem we would be encouraged by these numbers. But it’s not. These cases merely point to a much larger number of tragedies that we do not know about.”
Read the report (PDF) | Exonerations by state and county (PDF)
The registry itself, which looks deeply into 873 specific cases of wrongful conviction, examined cases based on court documents as well as from groups that have long documented wrongful convictions. That group of wrongfully convicted spent more than 10,000 total years in prison, according to the report, with an average of 11 years each.
Many of the cases of the wrongfully accused were championed by the Innocence Project, a well-known group that works with many inmates to try to clear their names based on DNA evidence. The group has documented 289 post-conviction DNA exonerations. The earliest came in 1989, when DNA testing was being heavily used to re-examine cases for the first time.
The database is a fully searchable list of those who were convicted, broken down by their crimes, sentences and reason for exoneration. Some go into extensive detail about the long and treacherous roads to exoneration that prisoners have undergone.
The report also shows which states have exonerated the most people. It notes that Illinois and New York may top the list in part because of the large presence of two major wrongful conviction centers in each state. From 1989 to 2011, the following states had tallied the most exonerations:
The Causes of Wrongful ConvictionAs the pace of DNA exonerations has grown across the country in recent years, wrongful convictions have revealed disturbing fissures and trends in our criminal justice system. Together, these cases show us how the criminal justice system is broken – and how urgently it needs to be fixed.
We should learn from the system’s failures. In each case where DNA has proven innocence beyond doubt, an overlapping array of causes has emerged – from mistakes to misconduct to factors of race and class.
Countless casesThose exonerated by DNA testing aren’t the only people who have been wrongfully convicted in recent decades. For every case that involves DNA, there are thousands that do not.
Only a fraction of criminal cases involve biological evidence that can be subjected to DNA testing, and even when such evidence exists, it is often lost or destroyed after a conviction. Since they don’t have access to a definitive test like DNA, many wrongfully convicted people have a slim chance of ever proving their innocence.
Common CausesHere you will find further information about seven of the most common causes of wrongful convictions:
Wrongful Conviction.
A miscarriage of justice primarily is the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. The term can also apply to errors in the other direction—”errors of impunity” and to civil cases. Most criminal justice systems have some means to overturn, or “quash”, a wrongful conviction, but this is often difficult to achieve. The most serious instances occur when a wrongful conviction is not overturned for several years, or until after the innocent person has been executed or died in jail.
“Miscarriage of justice” is sometimes synonymous with wrongful conviction, referring to a conviction reached in an unfair or disputed trial. Wrongful convictions are frequently cited by death penalty opponents as cause to eliminate death penalties to avoid executing innocent persons. In recent years, DNA evidence has been used to clear many people falsely convicted.
More than 2,000 people have been exonerated of serious crimes since 1989 in the United States, according to a report by college researchers who have established the first national registry of exonerations.
Researchers say their registry is the largest database of these types of cases and showcases some of the major issues with the criminal justice system, including that the leading causes of wrongful convictions are perjury, faulty witness identification and misconduct by prosecutors.
“No matter how tragic they are, even 2,000 exonerations over 23 years is a tiny number in a country with 2.3 million people in prisons and jails,” says a report released by the authors. “If that were the extent of the problem we would be encouraged by these numbers. But it’s not. These cases merely point to a much larger number of tragedies that we do not know about.”
Read the report (PDF) | Exonerations by state and county (PDF)
The registry itself, which looks deeply into 873 specific cases of wrongful conviction, examined cases based on court documents as well as from groups that have long documented wrongful convictions. That group of wrongfully convicted spent more than 10,000 total years in prison, according to the report, with an average of 11 years each.
Many of the cases of the wrongfully accused were championed by the Innocence Project, a well-known group that works with many inmates to try to clear their names based on DNA evidence. The group has documented 289 post-conviction DNA exonerations. The earliest came in 1989, when DNA testing was being heavily used to re-examine cases for the first time.
The database is a fully searchable list of those who were convicted, broken down by their crimes, sentences and reason for exoneration. Some go into extensive detail about the long and treacherous roads to exoneration that prisoners have undergone.
The report also shows which states have exonerated the most people. It notes that Illinois and New York may top the list in part because of the large presence of two major wrongful conviction centers in each state. From 1989 to 2011, the following states had tallied the most exonerations:
- Illinois: 101
- New York: 88
- Texas: 84
- California: 79
- Michigan: 35
- Louisiana: 34
- Florida: 32
- Ohio: 28
- Massachusetts: 27
- Pennsylvania: 27
The Causes of Wrongful ConvictionAs the pace of DNA exonerations has grown across the country in recent years, wrongful convictions have revealed disturbing fissures and trends in our criminal justice system. Together, these cases show us how the criminal justice system is broken – and how urgently it needs to be fixed.
We should learn from the system’s failures. In each case where DNA has proven innocence beyond doubt, an overlapping array of causes has emerged – from mistakes to misconduct to factors of race and class.
Countless casesThose exonerated by DNA testing aren’t the only people who have been wrongfully convicted in recent decades. For every case that involves DNA, there are thousands that do not.
Only a fraction of criminal cases involve biological evidence that can be subjected to DNA testing, and even when such evidence exists, it is often lost or destroyed after a conviction. Since they don’t have access to a definitive test like DNA, many wrongfully convicted people have a slim chance of ever proving their innocence.
Common CausesHere you will find further information about seven of the most common causes of wrongful convictions:
- Eyewitness Misidentification
- Unvalidated or Improper Forensic Science
- False Confessions / Admissions
- Government Misconduct
- Informants or Snitches
- Bad Lawyering
